Warner Music Pitches Music Tax to Universities: You Pay, We Stop Suing

Back in March, we noted that Warner Music Group had hired Jim Griffin, a music industry guy who has been pushing the concept of a “blanket license” for file sharing. The idea would be to get various ISPs to simply add an additional fee to everyone’s Internet access, have that money go into a pool that the recording industry would be responsible for paying out–and then let people have free reign for file sharing. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. It’s basically a music tax–allowing the record industry to be lazy. Someone else gets to go out and collect all this money and hand it over to the industry to distribute (or, actually, not distribute). It effectively sets the business model of the recording industry in stone, and harms better, more innovative business models by inserting the recording industry (and not the musicians) into a role where they don’t belong

Read the rest of this post